Bing or Google? Take the Challenge

Saturday

Feb 16, 2013 at 6:09 AM

If you haven't seen the phrase "Bing it on," you will soon. It is an invitation to take the Bing Challenge — sort of a blind taste-test, like the Coke/Pepsi challenge, but instead using search engines.

By LONNIE BROWNTHE LEDGER

If you haven't seen the phrase "Bing it on," you will soon. It is an invitation to take the Bing Challenge — sort of a blind taste-test, like the Coke/Pepsi challenge, but instead using search engines.

In this case, it's a contest between Bing, the search engine developed by Microsoft and introduced in 2009, and Google, the search company that's been around since the late 1990s.

Taking the challenge involves going to the website (www.bingiton.com). The challenge is to enter five separate search terms, one at a time. Each entry will produce two search-engine webpages, displayed side by side. Users pick one — or can check the box "I can't decide; it's a draw."

If you can't think of search phrases, some suggested ones are listed below the entry box. At the end of the fifth question, the results are displayed: The page selected is listed beside each search term so users will know which engine supplied which results.

Microsoft said last September that an independent research company, after doing a similar challenge test with users, found that those tested "preferred Bing web search results nearly 2:1 over Google in blind-comparison tests."

The challenge was introduced a few weeks before the presidential debates were held last year. On the eve of the debates, Microsoft officials announced that more than 5 million people had taken the Bing It On Challenge. Some of those users were given an independent survey after they took the challenge.

"Over half of the people surveyed indicated their impression of Bing improved after seeing Bing's web search results next to Google's," a company press release said. "Additionally, of people who identified Google as their primary search engine, 33 percent said they would use Bing more often after taking the Challenge and 17 percent who found Bing more favorable after taking the side-by-side comparison said it revealed flaws in Google's results."

Bing has a long way to go before Google begins to worry. Google has about 80 percent of the search-engine traffic in the world. That's the same share it has in the United States, with Bing and Yahoo tied for a majority of the remaining traffic, according to StatCounter.

As for the challenge, I've been a Google user since the search engine first came online. I took the challenge six times, for a total of 30 choices. Bing edged out Google, but not by much: I preferred Bing's web results 14 times to Google's 11, with 5 web searches resulting in a draw.

The website for the Bing search engine is www.bing.com.

[ Lonnie Brown has written the computer column for The Ledger for more than 30 years. He can be reached by email at LedgerDatabase@aol.com. ]

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